Notes

Now, Voyager and Mental Illness

At Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Now, Voyager, its presentation of mental illness and hope. “In the years since its release, the film has garnered a reputation as Davis’s best performance and a quintessential example of the women’s picture, a proto-feminist subgenre that took shape in 1930s Hollywood that made the interior lives of complex women its terrain. When I watched the 1942 film which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year — for the first time as a teenager, it wasn’t the glamour or even the stirring romance that captured my imagination. It was the knotted story about Charlotte’s struggle with mental illness that I was drawn to because it offered something I hadn’t seen before or since in cinematic madwomen: hope.”

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